


vouloir c'est pouvoir

by shuofthewind



Series: Of Blood and Dust [3]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials, Artist Steve Rogers, Canon-Typical Violence, Daniel Headcanons, Daniel Sousa Is A Failboat, Drabble Collection, F/M, French Resistance Daniel Sousa, French Resistance Peggy Carter, Headcanons Everywhere, Peggy Headcanons, Renewal Celebration Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-09
Updated: 2015-08-08
Packaged: 2018-03-29 17:06:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3904138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shuofthewind/pseuds/shuofthewind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's in Paris when France is liberated, when the American GIs come streaming into the city and people start to cry. The stump of his leg burns like a son of a bitch, and Martine is curled tightly around his arm.</p><p>[Daniel Sousa, his daemon, the War, and after. A story in six parts.]</p><p>[HDM fusion fic.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. i

He gets a load of guff, after Martine finally settles.

He’s not sure what to make of her, to be honest. Martine is his, and Daniel is hers—he doesn’t think she’s wrong, to take this form, to flare her hood when they lose their tempers. She looks right, and more importantly, she _feels_ right, like he’s shed his itchy skin and settled into a new face, a new identity, that finally seems to _fit_. Daniel Sousa and Martine the cobra, settled and true.

Of course, no one else really sees it like that. His big sister is more nervous around him than she used to be, her and her field mouse Jak. His dad had a python for a daemon, before he died, so it doesn’t bother his ma and her Nico that much at all. A few days after Martine settles (in summer, he’s fourteen, and the air tastes like hope and gasoline) she takes him aside and tells him that a lot of people are scared of snakes, so they ought to be careful, him and Martine. “So you don’t show her to the wrong person,” she says, her grey eyes pale in the shadow of the street lamp. “That’s all.”

“Okay,” he says. She squeezes him close, kissing his cheek, and he squirms a little, because Daniel doesn’t get it. Not then.

The first day of school, he comes home with split knuckles and a bloody nose. He’s been suspended. Martine had bitten Ricky Owens’ daemon, and they’d both had to go to the hospital. King cobras are poisonous, he thinks, watching his mother dab rubbing alcohol on the split skin. His hands are shaking. He’d learned that, reading about them at the library, but he hadn’t _thought_ about it. Martine hadn’t thought about it. She curls tightly around his neck, hiding under the collars of his shirts, and doesn’t say anything for three days. Not until they hear that Ricky is going to pull through.

People stop talking to Daniel much after that. He gets used to it. He was never much of a talker in the first place, so it doesn’t bother him, that he doesn’t seem to be able to hold more than one conversation a day. His sister moves out when he’s sixteen, getting married and moving to Wichita, which means it’s easier for them to wander around the house, now. He finishes school, and gets a job working construction. You’re supposed to have smaller daemons for that, daemons that can hide in pockets or shirts, so Martine stays in his sleeve and nobody bothers him about her.

The War starts the summer he turns twenty. Pearl Harbor is two years later. Martine lifts her head from beneath his collar when he goes to enlist, and the serviceman at the desk gives him a long, considering look before stamping his application form 2A.

They measure every part of him, Martine included. She shows off the length of her fangs, and he tells the story of her poison, and how Ricky Owens and his daemon were never the same after. The soldiers do a lot of jabbering to themselves, and then one of them gives him his papers. Another slips a card into the packet. “You’ll meet him soon,” he says, “but just keep that with you, just in case.” Daniel has his suspicions—war isn’t always clean, and people with snakes for daemons have a certain stereotype about them, a willingness to go too far—but he nods and tucks the card into his pocket anyway.

Daniel might speak German, but he looks Jewish, and that means they can’t send him into Reich territory. He also speaks French, and once he’s done with his training, that’s where they decide to send him. Occupied France, he thinks, Martine nudging up under his throat. Not as a killer—whatever psychological tests they ran on him must have disappointed them, because Daniel doesn’t have cold assassination in him, though of course the story’d be different if they gave him Hitler on a silver platter—but as a watcher, a considerer, a rebellion-monger. That he can do.

“There are others that we have in play in France,” a colonel whose name he can’t remember tells him, shouting over the wild wind as the cargo bay opens for the drop. “One of them will meet with you. After that, you’re on your own.”

“Sir,” says Daniel. When the colonel turns to leave, Martine lifts her head, sticks her nose in his ear.

“Are you ready?” she asks. He’s never heard her speak so loudly, and he can still barely hear her. Daniel cups a hand around her head, turning so he faces the wind. It’s only his second solo jump, and they’re flying low over the French countryside, all blacked-out. There’s a great number of trees down there. He clenches one hand into a fist against his side.

“Don’t think it matters if we’re not,” he says to her. Martine curls her tail tight around his upper arm, and squeezes once before nodding. Her tongue tickles the side of his neck.

“Tally-ho, then,” she says, in a terrible British accent. He’s laughing when they fall out of the plain and into the air, caught in the updraft and staring out at the wide dark world below.


	2. ii

The water tastes different in France. He can’t really quantify it. Even when they boil it, which really should take out all the impurities and things that differentiate it from American water, there’s still something ineffably _French_ about it. Less metallic, more…something else. He doesn’t know.

Daniel is in a flat in Saint Germaine, the black-out curtains drawn, six Resistance fighters sitting in his living room and two more hiding out in his kitchen. It’s been his assignment for the past six months; a stop on the Underground, a safehouse and a stopgap, someone to fix wounds, pass on reports, and send in orders for guns, food, supplies. The eight months before that, he was a cab driver around the city. It wasn’t the best way to eavesdrop, but more German officers take cabs than the French do. Money is scarce, now, for the French. Unless they’re working with the Germans, in which case, tracking where they’re coming and where they’re going—well, that’s more useful than he thought it would be.

He usually doesn’t have so many Resistance fighters in his place at one time, but the French police have been raiding all night, and people keep showing up. They’re not looking at each other, not wanting to know each other’s faces, in case they get called in to report. There’s not much they can do to help it, though.

Martine lifts her head, nudges her nose into his ear. “Cosette wants to talk to you,” she says in Yiddish. Daniel’s not a very good Jew, but he still remembers enough of what his grand-mère told him in order to get by. Martine’s better at it than he is. “And Auguste is stealing the last of the butter.”

Daniel swears under his breath. Auguste is more of a thief than a spy, and he’s barely even part of the Resistance. He’s one of those ticks that flip sides more often than cards in a game of poker, but he’s a clerk in one of the administration buildings that the Nazis have appropriated, so they can’t afford to ditch him. Not at the moment.

He’s turning to head back into the kitchen, where Auguste is probably scooping the butter into that little cigarette tin he keeps in his pockets, when he hears “ _le serpent_ ” and goes stiff around the shoulders. It’s Marie-Thérèse, sixteen and already in the fight, her dark eyes huge in her face. She flushes pink, and dips her head. “ _Je m’excuse, monsieur._ ”

“ _Laisse tomber_ ,” he tells her, and the girl turns a much darker red. She backs away from the living room door, probably to curl into a corner of the couch and pretend he didn’t say anything at all.

Daniel turns, and heads out onto the balcony instead.

It’s utterly black out here. Martine curls her way down his waist and onto the ground, slipping between the bars until she’s hanging halfway out into space, tasting the air. It always makes him nervous when she does that, but she never lets go, so he hasn’t had reason to be frightened yet. He rests his elbows on the ledge, propping his chin in his hands. If he tries, he can see just a bit down the street, but it’s the new moon and it’s cloudy; there’s no light to work with.

“She didn’t mean it,” says Martine. Martine’s always been the more level-headed of the two of them, and that’s saying something, considering how much it takes before Daniel loses his temper. “She’s a child.”

“I know.”

“Her daemon hasn’t even settled.”

Daniel thinks of the flickering bird in his living room, the one that keeps switching between a sparrow, a jay, and a bald-headed vulture. “I know that.” He doesn’t speak English much anymore. The words feel awkward and strange in his mouth. “At least she said sorry.”

Martine curls the end of her tail around his ankle. “Daniel.”

“I’m fine.” He looks down at Martine, but he can’t see her through the dark. “It doesn’t bother me anymore, honestly. If I keep caring about every time someone panics because of what we are, then I’ll care forever, and that’s just too damn exhausting.”

Martine makes a husky sound that usually means she’s laughing. She tightens her grip on his ankle. “Someone’s coming.”

He feels the footsteps a few seconds after she does. It’s Cosette, the one member of this group that speaks half-decent English, that opens the door. Daniel slips inside before too much light spills out. Black-outs are required by law. The Germans aren’t the ones bombing them—it’s the English. _Goodbye, Paris_.

“Donatien—” It’s the name they’ve given him in France, because even if they can tell he’s American, they don’t need to know his real one. “Donatien, the machine— _un message_.”

“Merci,” he says. “Merci.”

He keeps the telegraph in the hall closet. He can hear the clicking even from the living room. Martine slides back up his arm as he makes his way through the gaggle of eager Resistance fighters, and begins to script out the code. He can translate it in his head, mostly, by now. Still, when it’s done, he has to send back a message. _Repeat, dispatch._

 _Incoming SSR infiltration force_ , the message reads. _T-16 hrs. Led by le Chasseresse. May need safe house. Stand by._

 _Le Chasseresse_. The Huntress. The women of the Resistance gossip about her, not realizing he’s listening. A woman with a wolf for a daemon, who steals Nazi secrets and frees Nazi prisoners right under their goddamn noses. He’d thought she was a myth.

Le Chasseresse doesn’t end up needing a safe house that night. Still: now he knows she’s not just a bedtime story.

Now he knows she’s a part of the SSR.


	3. iii

He meets Captain America twice.

It's 1944. He’s not sure why _Captain America_ , of all people, is in Paris, or why they’re dumping one of the famous Howling Commandos on Daniel’s couch (well, he does know why; Falsworth has a bullet in his leg that’s going to fester if they don’t keep him off his feet) but he is and they are, this is happening, and Captain Rogers nods once before they vanish out the door again.

Falsworth looks up at him through eyes that are bleary with fever, his daemon (a robin, curled against his chest) shaking as if she’s in a windstorm. “Hullo,” he says. “I don’t know you.”

“That’s okay,” Daniel strokes Martine’s head, just beneath his collar. “You don’t need to know me. We just need to fix your leg up. Try not to die on me.”

“No,” says Falsworth dizzily. “No, dying sounds—sounds very terribly unpleasant.”

It’s a messy process, getting the bullet out. (There were bits of shrapnel left behind, and by the time they’re finally done Daniel wants to _kill_ whoever did such a shoddy job on this man’s leg.) Martine finally can’t stand hiding inside Daniel’s sleeve anymore, and settles on a nearby table to watch as Daniel rinses the wound with alcohol (Falsworth is unconscious for this part, thankfully) and then stitches it shut and wraps it in bandages he’s supposed to be sending on to Cosette. He’s cleaned everything up and settled with a cigarette (a gift from one of the Resistance fighters, since they’re so scarce lately) and a glass of scotch (because he _really_ hates shrapnel) when Falsworth opens his eyes again. He’s still feverish.

“You have a very odd room,” says Falsworth.

“That’s ‘cause it’s the living room,” says Daniel. “Go back to sleep.”

Falsworth glances to the side, sees Martine, and then looks at Daniel again. There’s no fear in his face, just confusion. He’s much too sharp for someone who ought to be unconscious. He clears his throat. “What’s your name?”

“Donatien,” says Daniel. This man may be one of the Commandos, but he’s not about to blow his cover. “You?”

Falsworth considers him for a moment. Then he heaves himself up, so he’s sitting instead of lying flat. “Falsworth,” he says. “But you knew that already.”

“Just trying to be polite.”

“Mm.” Falsworth lists to the side, resting his cheek on the pillow. “I’m going to sleep now,” he says, and he does. His robin is curled up underneath his chin.

Daniel turns out the light, and heads for the telegraph machine.

The second time Captain America shows up on his doorstep, it’s two days later. Falsworth is much brighter, now that the fever’s broken, but he’s still not strong enough to be doing much other than lying around, complaining about the lack of milk and decent tea. (Falsworth is a walking English stereotype. He finds it amusing more than anything.) There’s the coded knock on the fire escape window, and when Daniel heaves it open, Captain Rogers (much, much larger than he has a right to be, considering he holds himself like he’s much, much smaller) and the Asian man who lugged Falsworth into his flat in the first place slip through.

“Sorry about the Brit,” says the Asian man. “He nag you too much?”

“You two are _bloody late_ ,” shouts Falsworth from the other room. The Asian man rolls his eyes, snaps Daniel a lazy salute, and then wanders off to go and deal with the Englishman. His daemon is a blue jay; she’s sitting in his hat. Captain Rogers folds his hands awkwardly in front of him, his daemon sticking close to his side.

“Thanks,” he says. “For watching him.”

“No problem.”

Captain Rogers cocks his head, as if he’s heard some echo he recognizes. “Tribeca?”

Daniel jerks. He’s really not supposed to be using English right now. Still: if anyone can learn that he’s not actually French and keep it a secret, it’d probably be Captain America. “Yeah,” he says. “Born and raised.”

The corner of Captain Rogers’ mouth lifts a little. He sticks out his hand. “Steve,” he says. Martine lifts her head from Daniel’s collar, and Rogers eyes her for a moment. “And Linde,” he adds, and his German Shepherd daemon gives him a small canine smile.

“Daniel,” says Daniel, and shakes his hand. “And Martine.”

“Nice to meet you,” he says.

They’re gone the next morning. Someone leaves behind a piece of paper torn out of an old notebook, an image of Tribeca at sunset. It’s signed _S.R.,_ and dated 1940. Daniel folds it up and sticks it in the hidden compartment of his right shoe.

When Cosette asks him what happened to the bandages, he shrugs and says, “Friend of Captain America’s took them.”

“Funny,” says Cosette waspishly, and shoves the rest of the medical supplies into her jacket. “Really hilarious, Donatien.”

Martine laughs in his ear.  


	4. iv

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some violence in this one, and mentions of mines/death/injuries. Mostly vague.

He loses his leg in a firefight with the Germans, two weeks before VE Day.

He’s really not supposed to be fighting. He’s doing his bit for the US by keeping an eye on the Resistance; supplying them, patching them up, making sure that the few who _are_ still fighting get to keep on going. But he’s never been able to keep his nose out of trouble, and one night when Cosette asks him, he agrees to go on a raid.

They get in a truck and drive a few hours out of Paris, to a farmhouse that looks empty from the outside and is filled with Nazis. “We need them out of there,” says Cosette. Her owl daemon turns his head backwards. “We need it cleared.”

“We can do that,” Daniel says.

The fields are laced with mines. It’s an accident when they step on one. Cosette dies. Daniel wakes up later in an American field hospital, not remembering half of what’s happened. His leg is gone.

Martine fills him in.

Rehabilitation is a wicked bitch. He’s in Paris when it’s liberated, and he’s stuck in bed being measured for a prosthetic even though his leg is too swollen to take one for at least another three months as the Germans are chased out of the city he’s called his own for four years. The nurse that keeps an eye on him (one nurse to a ward of fifty, and she rarely speaks to him because Martine stays pooled inky black in his lap) mentions that it’s better to think of himself now as someone who can actually say he fought, instead of sitting on his ass the whole war long. Martine bares her fangs and hisses, and the nurse never looks at him again.

There’s something in him that he can’t control, and it tastes like fury.

Nobody writes him up for joining a Resistance raid, even though they really should. Actually, they promote him for it. He’s not actually sure what his title was before the war ends, but now that it’s over he’s _Agent_ Sousa. It’s odd. He’s not sure who _Agent_ Sousa is, because _Agent_ Sousa has a commendation from the US Army and even a medal lying around somewhere that he can’t ever remember accepting.

He goes back to Tribeca, and speaks French to his mother, and wonders if she pities him for being a goddamn idiot.

1946, and he’s hired by the Strategic Scientific Reserve. He doesn’t know who puts his name up for consideration, only that he gets a letter in the mail to let him know he has an interview in April at four pm on a Wednesday afternoon. He nearly declines. Martine noses his fingers, and says, “Considering everything, they can at least give you a job.”

He can’t argue with her, because he can never argue with her. Martine’s good at that.

Dooley’s the one who shows him around the offices. Dooley doesn’t even look at Martine. His own daemon, a horny toad that squats on his desk and blinks her big, big eyes at Daniel, just watches him. He says, “You’d be working with people of your own caliber. Better than anything else you could get.”

“My own caliber,” says Daniel. “What’s that mean, exactly?”

“War heroes,” says Dooley. “Exceptional soldiers. People who made a difference.”

“If that’s the sort of person you’re looking for, sir, I don’t know if I’m the right guy for the job.”

Dooley’s daemon licks her own eyeball. Dooley leans back in his desk chair, and then says, “Actually, Agent Sousa, the fact that you said that to me at all means that you _are_ one of the right guys for the job. You just don’t know it yet.”

Daniel opens his mouth, and then closes it again. Martine slips from his sleeve and onto his knee, and Dooley’s daemon shies away. It’s normal, he thinks. He watches it happen with a strange sort of distance, as if it’s a film he knows by heart. That, at least, is familiar.

Dooley offers him the job. Daniel, not Donatien, is the one that accepts. When they leave the office, there’s a woman with dark hair in tight curls waiting for them outside, holding a folder to her chest. Her wolf daemon stands close against her leg.

“Chief Dooley,” she says. “May I have a word?”

“Not now, Carter,” says Dooley, and passes her without another glance. She presses her lips tight together, and at her side, the daemon bares his teeth. There’s a long scar across the wolf’s cheek, as if it’s taken a crease from a bullet.

 _A dark woman,_ he thinks, _with a wolf daemon_.

“Is there a problem?” she asks, waspish. Daniel realizes he’s staring, and clears his throat.

“No, sorry.” His eyes dip down to the daemon again. “I just—sorry.”

She sniffs, turns on her heel, and marches off to one of the desks. It’s only once Daniel’s alone in the elevator, staring at the ceiling, that Martine lifts her head again.

“ _Le Chasseresse_ ,” she says.

“We don’t know that for sure.”

“ _You_ don’t know that for sure,” says Martine archly. “But it stands to reason that a woman with a wolf daemon who works for the SSR is, in fact, Le Chasseresse.”

There’s nothing he can say in response to this. They fall into a comfortable silence for a moment.

“She’s pretty,” Martine says, her tongue flickering against his ear in a sly, teasing way. “You made an idiot of yourself.”

“I hate you,” says Daniel, and laughs for the first time since he came back to the States. “You just—I hate you. You’re terrible. Be quiet.”

Martine flares her hood happily, and then settles it again. “No,” she says. “You don’t.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, hey, look, two chapters in one day. I must like writing Daniel. 
> 
> (I'm procrastinating other projects shhhhhhh ignore me.)


	5. v

“What do you think?” she asks, and then leans back so she can fix the wig on her head. “Am I the right type of floozy?”

His mouth quirks, watching her. The wig’s not a natural red, but a bright, bloody dye job that makes her skin look even paler. She’s wearing darker lipstick than usual, to try and pull it off, but it’s not working that well. He thinks of his sister for a moment, when he’d been ten and she fourteen, stealing their mother’s lipsticks.  _Danny_! she’d shouted from the mirror.  _Danny, what do you think of this one_?

“Daniel,” says Peggy, and cocks her head at him. “Are you all right?”

“Nothing.” Martine slips off his lap, down his leg, and curls her tail around Peggy’s ankle. Her shoes are off in a rare show of vulnerability; she says they pinch her toes if she wears them for too long, but if she wears anything else while at the office the other agents seem to think that she’s easier to loom over. “Sorry, I was just thinking.”

“About what?” She tugs the wig off her head, and settles it back on the mannequin’s scalp. “You looked very grim.”

“Just—my sister, that’s all.” He glances at the wig again. “Looks too desperate. The color, I mean. The guy likes redheads, but…”

“But not this sort of redhead.” Peggy lifts a curl of the bloody red wig, and then lets it fall again. Her hair’s deliciously mussed, and now that the wig’s gone the lipstick looks much better. He wants to kiss it off her mouth. “I thought so. It’s garish.”

“Hm?”

“You’re distant today, aren’t you?” She sets her palm against his shoulder. Bader presses up against his fake leg. It makes his skin tingle, even though it really shouldn’t. His prosthesis can’t feel warmth, or texture. It’s not his leg, but the touch makes him feel—he doesn’t know. It makes him  _feel_ , because here’s Peggy with her hand on him, and here’s Bader, trusting him, and it’s too damn much. “Are you quite certain you’re all right?”

“I’m fine.” He covers her hand with his, glancing at the half-open door. It’s still the middle of the work day; she’s usually the one who tries to keep her distance, even if Garcia’s made him switch desks so they’re side by side. (“I’m sick of you stealing my chair for your damn crush,” Garcia told him, and he doesn’t think that it shows on his face, the knowledge that he has kissed Peggy Carter, that she’s kissed him back, but he doesn’t dare let himself speak. He just nods, and Garcia went off, unknowing.) Peggy searches his face, and then bends down and collects Martine. It sends a bolt of lightning up his spine. “Really. I just—I haven’t thought about my sister in a while, that’s all.”

“Did your sister teach you about this sort of thing?” She touches the wig again, and then collects a tissue, wiping off the darker lipstick. When he blinks, Peggy sends him a smile. “Don’t be obtuse, Daniel. What’s she like? Your sister.”

“Quiet,” Daniel says after a moment. He has to think. He hasn’t seen Adeline since she married the Hornton boy from down the street, since she’d left the city. “Kind of shy. She looks like our mother, more than me. Blonde.”

“Blonde?” Peggy’s lips curl up. “I can’t imagine you blonde.”

“I look like our dad, apparently.” He shrugs. “She lives in Wichita now. Adeline, I mean. Moved there before the war. I haven’t—god, I haven’t seen her since she moved.”

“Quiet,” she repeats. Peggy glances back at the door. “She sounds like you.”

Daniel can’t help it. He laughs a little. “She was always sort of scared of me, I think. She remembers him, our dad. She was—she was really young when he died, only four. I wasn’t even born. But I look like him, or so they say, so it…bothers her, I guess.”

“It’s not you,” says Martine suddenly. She’s still wound tight around Peggy’s arm; she squeezes once, and then drops down, until she’s semi-curled around the arm of Daniel’s chair, until she can raise her head and flare her hood, just a little. “She’s scared of me. Her and Jak, they were scared. It’s not your fault, Daniel.”

They’re quiet for a moment. Peggy glances back at the door one more time, and then lifts her hand, stroking her thumb over his cheekbone. Martine’s slid down her arm and onto Bader, nudging her nose into his ear. She just looks at him for a time, and then she bends forward and presses her lips to his forehead. It feels strikingly intimate, that moment. Her lipstick is gone. It’s only her mouth against his skin, like a tattoo, or a brand.

He thinks about kissing her, then. They’ve already talked about what happens between them at work, already agreed that it would be terrible to deal with, if anyone learns that they’re together—if this strange, amorphous, unbelievable thing is togetherness, he doesn’t know; he’s gone steady with girls before but none of them were Peggy Carter, so he’s not certain. She’d be removed from her position, most likely, and he has no idea what Thompson would do to him. Still, he wants to kiss her; he wants to tangle his fingers in her mussed hair and kiss her until she’s breathless, until she makes that noise in the back of her throat that’s almost a whine, but not quite. He just  _wants_. He thinks she sees it, because she catches her breath and searches his face, her fingernails digging into his shoulder-blade. Then her hand slips away. Bader rests his head on Daniel’s knee, and it kindles a warmth in his muscles, next to his bones.

“Well, then,” Peggy says. “She’s a fool, because you’re not frightening at all.”

He snorts. “Thanks, Peg.”

“You’re quite welcome,” she says, and glances back at the wigs. “I’ll go with the more natural one, don’t you think?” Peggy looks at him from under her eyelashes, and then collects the mannequin head. “I’ll rely on you for the lipstick, shall I?”

Bader lets his tongue loll out from between his teeth, and laughs.


	6. vi

They’re at a bar on mission when Martine bites someone for the second time.

Daniel’s kind of furious with himself. He’d known that coming into this place with a limp was asking to be a target. Most people can pick out GIs and vets with a practiced eye, a year and a half after the War. And yeah, of course the War had a _purpose_ , because men fought and died for causes that had reason and weight behind them, but things get ruined in wars that very often can’t ever be fixed. What happened to the men like the ones in this bar, Japanese, second generation, third, all packed together and shuffled off to internment camps like the Germans did to the Jews, that should never be forgotten. And these men look at him, a man who carries himself like an ex-soldier, and they remember the men who dragged them from their houses with nothing more than they could carry and shunted them off to camps without any reason.

So yeah. Of course he’d been asking to be a target, coming in here. That’s part of why Thompson sent him in. _You’re the perfect bait_ , he’d said. _Just give us long enough to get into the back room, take a few photos. Easy as pie._

Clearly, Thompson has never made pie.

He takes a fist to the cheekbone, and uses his walking stick to bash the guy in the head. Three more take his place. He gets flickering shots of their daemons— _a bird of some kind, a little terrier like Krzeminski’s, a raccoon_ —and then Martine’s hissing and slipping away from him, baring her teeth, flaring her hood. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a door open and close again. Agent Kim has made her move. Then one of the men in the bar spits in his face, and reaches out to seize Martine, hissing under his breath “ _snake daemon, bastard, snake, snake—_ ”

Martine sinks her fangs into the web of skin between the man’s thumb and forefinger, no hesitation, no question, and it’s like someone’s broken an egg at the back of his throat, stabbing shell and dripping yolk. Daniel chokes, and the man chokes, and the whole room goes still, but not because of Martine. The room goes still because the front door has slammed open, and Bader is beside him in an instant, so far away from Peggy that Daniel worries it’s hurting them both.

“Excuse me,” says Peggy, one hand raised, a pistol clasped in her red-nailed fingers. “But might I ask you to back away?”

The Japanese men look at each other. The one Martine bit, he’s staggering a little. Cobra venom doesn’t work that fast, but the touch of another daemon—that does. She cocks her pistol, and they scoot out of the way. Peggy eyes the ringleader, and then puts her gun back in her pocket, dragging a handkerchief out instead.

“My apologies,” she says, and he thinks it’s both to him and to the men who attacked him. She folds the handkerchief up into a small square, and presses it to the Japanese man’s hand. “I would advise you to get to a hospital as quickly as you can. But _don’t run_. Be sure to go to Metro General. I know for a fact that they have the necessary anti-venom.” And how the hell Peggy knows that, he has no idea, but the man seems to consider it quite seriously before leaving the bar. She hooks an arm through Daniel’s limp one, and collects Martine. Bader is still stuck to his side, his teeth bared.

“She’s out the window,” Peggy says in a low voice, and slowly, Daniel relaxes. “One step at a time, Sousa.”

Daniel nods once, and looks at the men in the bar. One’s bleeding. He thinks it’s one he punched in the nose.

“Sorry,” he says.

The man has a strange, flickering expression, almost like he’s fighting himself. He turns his face away.

Daniel and Peggy leave steadily, without looking back. They pass the car that Thompson left behind for his extraction (Garcia looks at them with raised eyebrows, but drives off without them anyway) and out of Hell’s Kitchen. It’s only once they’ve reached the intersection of 51st and 10th that he realizes they’ve basically switched daemons. Martine is tucked into Peggy’s sleeve, hidden, and Bader—Bader’s stationed on his bad side.

Peggy stops abruptly beside a dim alleyway, and looks up at him. Her fingers brush against a bruise on his cheek, and then dance away. “Are you all right?”

“Fine.” He thinks he should be irritated that she stepped in, but he’s not. “Thought you were off in Brooklyn.”

“I was on my way until I realized that Thompson sent me there in an effort to keep me away from this one.” Which Daniel doesn’t put past Thompson at all, but still. “I assume he thought that I would be a bit too distinctive.”

“Well, Bader is very pretty,” says Daniel, and Bader laughs through his teeth. He looks around—because it’s automatic, he can’t help it—before reaching out to touch her shoulder where he knows Martine is. His hands should be shaking. They’re not. “You’re all right?”

Peggy is silent, because she knows he isn’t talking to her. Martine shifts a little underneath the sleeve, and then her head emerges from Peggy’s collar. Her hood is flat again.

“I think so,” says Martine. “I don’t like biting much.”

Peggy’s eyes flicker the way the man’s did, back in the bar. She presses her lips together, and stays quiet.

“Sorry,” says Daniel.

“It’s all right.” She noses at his fingers. “I will always bite when I need to.”

“Good,” says Peggy, low and fierce. “Bite Thompson.”

Martine laughs, startled. Something in Daniel’s throat is tight, because he remembers the first time Martine bit someone, remembers Ricky Owens, and the fact that she’s not coiled and silent and frightened—that in and of itself is a miracle. It feels like—it feels like he has nothing to be frightened of, anymore. It feels like Martine isn’t frightened anymore, of herself, of her fangs. It feels like that steadiness, that knowledge of his own skin, has finally shifted its last dead scale.

“Thank you,” he tells Martine.

Martine hides her face in Peggy’s throat for a moment (and god, the wonder of it, Peggy Carter with his daemon, her fangs that just poisoned a man, pressed right up against her windpipe and she doesn’t even flinch, it overwhelms him, consumes him) and then lets out a breathy little noise that’s almost a laugh. “You’re welcome.”

(He kisses Peggy in the alleyway, because really. Who’s not going to turn down a chance like that?)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like an asshole for letting this rest so long. Also for how shitty this chapter is. 
> 
> In other news, I had a longass Daredevil fic to finish, as well as, you know. Getting a job in another country and moving and dealing with all that crap.
> 
> (but really important news guys I just called a cute guy and interrupted him in a Skype call heLP IT TOOK SO MUCH COURAGE AND NOW I'M EMBARRASSED)
> 
> Next installment of _Of Blood and Dust_ : Cartinelli! (A bunch of different pairings in this series, guys.)


End file.
